Services in the European Union : What Kinds of Regulatory Policies Enhance Productivity?
This paper is the first one to show the effects of services regulations on downstream firms in the goods and services sectors in a multiple-country setting using firm-level data. The study selected a group of countries that are economically relativ...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/431711481813102900/Services-in-the-European-Union-what-kinds-of-regulatory-policies-enhance-productivity http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25818 |
| Summary: | This paper is the first one to show the
effects of services regulations on downstream firms in the
goods and services sectors in a multiple-country setting
using firm-level data. The study selected a group of
countries that are economically relatively services-oriented
and show varying degrees of services regulations over time,
namely the European Union. The paper employs four
alternative firm-level measures of total factor productivity
that have recently been developed in the economics
literature and provide robust conclusions. Overall, the
results suggest that regulatory barriers in services have
diverse effects on downstream manufacturing performance,
depending on the type of regulatory measure in question. The
policy variables are split into pure entry barriers and
those that relate to the anti-competitive policies on the
operations of the firm, which the paper calls conduct
regulations. The latter appear to play the most important
role in explaining downstream performance across services
and goods firms. Furthermore, the results show that
regulations matter significantly more in the cases when a
country is institutionally weak, an industry is considered
as relatively close to the technology frontier, or a firm is
foreign owned. |
|---|